Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence — What they are to business

Most leading companies today rely on the power of Machine Learning(ML) and Artificial Intelligence(AI) to understand consumer behaviour, turn data into information and propel themselves into a productive tomorrow.

Thought I’d write this short note on what Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are and their business relevance. If I look at it holistically, saving time and gaining insights are the two biggest gains from these technologies. let me give you a snapshot on why tomorrow’s business will belong to ML and AI

What is Machine Learning?

Machine learning gives computers the ability to program themselves without explicitly asking command for each and every task given to it. Machine learning develops programs that help the computer to access data, learn it and compute the tasks given accordingly. This helps computers to execute tasks automatically without human intervention.

Machine learning algorithms come in two categories:

1. Supervised

2. Unsupervised

Supervised algorithms require human intervention to provide an input and output whereas unsupervised algorithms do not require humans to provide an input and an output to the machine. This is an iterative approach called Deep Learning that helps the machine to read data and arrive at conclusions all by itself.

Machine learning helps you in completing complex tasks that cannot be done easily by humans.

Machine learning business applications:

Machine learning is found everywhere in our daily lives and I’ll share some use cases:

• The online shopping recommendations that you get on your smartphone,
• Driver-less cars and advanced automotive technology
• Your Facebook feed that suggests your friends and the content that may interest you,
• Voice feature in your smartphones that recognises your speech and talks to you.
• Machine learning is also the key foundation of dynamic pricing and image classification and
• Machine Learning can identify sentiment analysis with 83% accuracy on twitter feeds.

This knowledge in the hands of a marketer — priceless !!

A classic often discussed example of Machine learning is, The Bayesian spam filter developed by computer Scientist and famed Startup Investor Paul Graham. It used ML to identify spam based on certain keywords.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Coming to artificial intelligence, it is an umbrella term of machine learning. While artificial intelligence constructs machines that have cognitive power, machine learning constructs algorithms that mines data from a data set and learns from it and reasons according to it.

Image credit-AllTechBuzz

Machine learning factors into the development of AI, as it is an application of AI, which provides the intelligence and learning to the systems. Though machine learning counts as AI, all AI does not count as machine learning as it is far more vast than what machine learning does. AI mimics human intelligence which includes complex features like visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.

Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence have catalysed the pace of innovation in various fields with heavy data processing and heavy customer interaction. This was made possible with Chatbots for customer service, personalised communication, automatically generated replies for emails and much more.

The tool we developed, Alore CRM, also harnesses the power of AI . feel free to sign up for a free trial for educational purposes to tinker around and see how AI is helping revolutionise sales productivity and the difference it makes.

Artificial intelligence in business:

AI has innumerable use cases in business. Listing some:

• Combined with machine learning, AI helps to detect fraud claims in insurance and related fields
• Sales and marketing teams can derive tremendous insights on consumer behaviour and customer lifetime value (CLTV)
• It detects and diagnoses diseases in healthcare.
• Provide great insights to designers
• Helps achieve price optimisation for products and services
• AI is also used in the Pharmaceutical Industry to screen drug compounds as well as to determine what drugs work better for individuals based on their Biology.

Source: Tata Consultancy Services/HBR

Awesome, isn’t it ?!

Wrapping up:

Machine learning involves applying certain logic and deriving results accordingly. It does not bother about the machine thinking intelligently, whereas, artificial intelligence needs the machine to think intelligently and derive solutions.

Machine learning and artificial Intelligence will together provide a massive thrust to businesses. The game has begun but we are yet to exploit the potential these technologies hold. Most companies are yet to adopt AI and ML into everyday business decisions and unless they do so, we’re not really doing much to step into the future.

About me: Chief visionary at Alore CRM who breathes his mission of an AI powered productive world.

Originally published at blog.alore.io on March 21, 2018.